Who's that ugly guy?
Lets start out with the basics. My name is Ryan, I'm 21 years young, and I've been doing web design and development since 2004. It's my hobby, my passion, and (more often than not) the reason I own several
stress balls. Until 2008, I was totally self taught and prided myself on the fact that I could create websites without any sort of formal schooling to show me how. Then I went back to school, and it totally changed the way I think about the internet.
As far as learning goes, I've been exposed to several different languages over the past 6 years. Some I've really enjoyed, some I utterly despise, and some that still remain much of a mystery to me. I decided long ago to learn PHP and make super awesome websites with it, and now I have the skills to do so. Take this site for example, it might look pretty tame on the surface but I assure you it's anything but under the hood. As well as your standard web development languages like XHTML and CSS, I have some experience with Actionscript (minimal, I assure you), as well as XML and some Javascript.
History
Prior to entering the web development industry, I worked for a company called
Panago for 5 years. It's not really something I like to brag about, but it paid what few bills I had and made me essentially self sufficient. Given my extended stay at this job, they eventually promoted me to 'shift supervisor' and taught me basic management skills. At the same time, for a period of about a year, I was also working at a local Italian restaurant where I learned basic cooking skills, and that I really didn't want to be a line cook in a kitchen anymore.
I currently work for Devicemedia as a web developer. You can see all the cool things we're doing by visiting
our site.
Outside of work, and when it isn't winter (it's almost always winter in Alberta), you can usually find me tearing down some street/mountain/river/ski hill on my
bike.
